Democrats - Seeking a Future in the South

The midterm elections were bad for Democrats overall, but nowhere was the bloodbath worse than in the South.  Why so bad in the South?  My conjecture is three fold: racism against a black president since the GOP tried to frame the election as a referendum on Obama, the GOP's willingness to prostitute it to evangelical Christians who are most populous in the South, and white voters incensed that their white privilege is, at least in their minds, eroding and that "those other people" are rising.  It was yet another last stand of the old Confederacy.  So what are Democrats to do other than wait for further demographic change, including the literal dying off of aging, angry whites?   A piece in the New York Times looks at the soul searching taking place.  Here are excerpts:

Burns Strider, a native Mississippian who has advised the Democratic Party on faith issues, spent Tuesday night watching the election returns with a couple of other Democratic consultants and a bottle of small-batch bourbon. It was that kind of night.

The Republican wave on Tuesday washed over the whole country, including Massachusetts and Maryland, but it was in the South that the swamping of statewide Democratic prospects appeared most complete.

In the foggy hangover of Wednesday morning, Democrats in the South maintained in interviews that such Republican gains should not be considered permanent. But neither were they kidding themselves about the length and difficulty of the road ahead.

In perhaps the most emblematic victory, a Republican, Rick Allen, beat John Barrow of Georgia, the last white Democrat in the House from a Deep South state. His defeat was a testament to just how rare white Democrats have become in the region, a rarity that cuts across categories. In Georgia, according to exit polls by Edison Research, 80 percent of whites who did not graduate from college voted for David Perdue, the Republican Senate candidate. Among white college graduates, that number was not much lower, at 70 percent.

“It’s Obama,” Mike Beebe, a Democrat and the departing governor of Arkansas, said in his office at the State Capitol on Wednesday. “It wasn’t just Arkansas. It was all over the country. There’s only one common denominator.”

“We needed to change the electorate,” Mr. Reed [Mayor of Atlanta] said. He faulted the campaigns of Michelle Nunn, who was following in her father’s footsteps in running for the Senate, and Jason Carter, a grandson of Jimmy Carter who was running for governor, for not spending more time and resources to register and turn out what he said were roughly 600,000 unregistered black voters in Georgia, and 200,000 unregistered Latinos.

Many also believe that the older, rural, white working-class voters who were once the bedrock of the Democratic Party in the South are now permanently out of reach, and that attempts to attract them are a waste of time.

Bill Fletcher, a Democratic consultant who was raised in rural Tennessee, agreed that this year’s race was mainly a rejection of Mr. Obama, adding that his presidency had given rise to “a nasty strain of racism that many of us thought and hoped had gone away.”

Some Republicans, while flush with victory, were fully aware that the whiter and older electorate that gave Republicans such a resounding victory on Tuesday could not be counted on forever, and are already planning to secure and even expand on their gains in the South.

“If we just assume we’re safe, we’re wrong,” said Henry Barbour, a Mississippi-based lobbyist and a member of the Republican National Committee. “Mississippi, like the rest of the country, is changing. If Republicans don’t do a genuinely good job of engaging African-Americans, Hispanics and Asians, women and young voters, it becomes much more plausible for a statewide Democrat from Mississippi to win.”